LA murals disappearing

LOS ANGELES - Every so often, Ernesto de la Loza drives around the city to check on the state of his murals. It's a short tour these days. Out of 42 swirling, vivid pieces he has painted, only seven remain, the rest lost to graffiti, whitewash and sun.

"It's really painful," said the 61-year-old artist, whose works depict Angeleno life from Mexican heritage to the dangers of drugs. "People say. 'Don't take it personal,' but it's totally personal. They're my babies."

Los Angeles, which once hosting an estimated 1,500 pieces of wall art, is the nation's mural capital, but that's a fading distinction thanks to prolific graffiti taggers, neglect and a legal morass over classifying murals as illegal signs.

"I never thought 30 years ago that I would have to save works from being destroyed," said muralist Judith Baca, an art professor at the UCLA and founder-artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center, which promotes and protects murals. "We've had to defend one piece after another."

LA's murals, spawned during the '70s in East Los Angeles, form a kaleidoscope of color and imagery in a city known for bland urban sprawl. Some are so large they're best viewed blocks away, while others are easily digested in a drive-by glance.

They pay homage to celebrities - Anthony Quinn as "Zorba the Greek" towers over a downtown parking lot, Steve McQueen stares out from the side of a house. Some celebrate civic milestones, such as the 1984 Olympics, or such institutions as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. The mother of all, Baca's "The Great Wall of Los Angeles," is a half-mile stretch of California history along a San Fernando Valley drainage canal.

Others are displays of immigrant pride and ethnic history or abstract visions and palettes of pop art blanketing the sides of corner stores and businesses in blue-collar neighborhoods.

"They're a reflection of us and who we are as a city," said Pat Gomez, the city's murals manager.

Most of the murals - about 1,100 - are located on private property. Four hundred others, created as part of the city's mural program that ended in 2006 in a municipal-budget crunch, are mostly on public land.

The exact number of lost murals is hard to determine. Baca's group inventoried a sample of 105 city-sponsored works and found that 60 percent had vanished.

Graffiti is blamed as the biggest culprit. Murals often are targeted by vandals because the city does not regularly remove tags from murals, so the spray-paint scrawls remain indefinitely. Blank walls are easier to clean and are whitewashed by city workers within days.

In the case of private property, the city requires the owner to remove the graffiti or face a fine. Sometimes, the owner removes the mural, too, to avoid repeated citations.

For freeway murals, the state Transportation Department requires artists or others to pick up the $3,000 tab to erect barricades for the cleanup work, money that few artists have.

"When is it the job of the individual artist to maintain a public work?" Baca asked rhetorically.

After de la Loza's favorite work celebrating Latino diversity, "City of Passion," was painted over by the city because it was deemed "too ethnic," he sued. He won a $52,000 settlement and the right to restore the mural, which had been saved under a protective coat beneath the whitewash.

But only months later, markings declaring gang turf were choking the work's brilliant colors. The city whitewashed the wall and planted vines to prevent more graffiti.

Baca advocates setting aside 1 percent of the roughly $40 million a year the city and county spend to remove graffiti for mural-cleaning, making vandals remove their work, and giving taggers their own wall space to paint.

Her proposals have fallen on deaf ears. The city is proposing an ordinance to preserve murals, but it does not address removing graffiti from the art, which takes more time and money because the artist must be present and the mural touched up.

It would, however, save murals targeted by city building inspectors as "illegal signs" because they were either painted during a citywide billboard ban or do not conform to signage rules on size and location. The issue is that city rules now don't differentiate between commercial signs and art murals.